General Facebook Stats

First off, here are some basic statistics on how people use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 229 friends and likes 40 brands. They spend an average of 1.5 hours/week on Facebook, accessing it from 7,000 different devices. 58% of Facebook users return daily. And 65% of people who like brands on Facebook do so for the coupons/savings they can access. (source + Facebook Insights 2012) There are 50 million Facebook pages that post 36 times per month – 2.5 million of those that are promoted through Facebook ads. (source) And 40% of people’s time spent on Facebook is on their newsfeed, while only 12% of their time is spent on profile and brand pages. (source)

image from PhotoDune

If you haven’t figured it out mathematically, Facebook is NOISY for most users. I’m a super user (outlier), so I’m not the best example, but I have 3,233 friends (I try to weed them out to only people I’ve met from time to time, but it keeps growing), like 898 pages (don’t know when THAT happened, oy), am part of 49 Facebook groups (some are SUPER active) and have a public page where I’ve grown 64,864 followers (who can comment, like and otherwise engage with my profile unless I limit visibility on a post). Facebook’s Edgerank helps me a great deal. Sure, I don’t see everything and I’m sure I’m missing all sorts of uber important life events and sales and launches, but it makes my experience on Facebook a little more sane.

My Mom, who defines herself as a luddite, has 174 friends on Facebook, 6 likes and is part of 1 group. She doesn’t have a public profile, so doesn’t have ‘followers’. She still finds the amount of posts and news on Facebook to be overwhelming at times, so she created her favorites so she would always see what’s happening with her family as we post items. She has created a filter ON TOP OF the Edgerank that Facebook provides to help her manage the posts from all of her friends.

I can understand that a brand who thinks that every like is an undivided attention endorsement would think that 8-16% of their followers seeing their posts means that Facebook is ripping them off. But anyone who thinks a little bit and understands how this works should get that Edgerank IS FOR THE USERS not for the marketers.

How Edgerank Works

Image from Photodune

Edgerank isn’t some plot against brands who don’t pay for advertising on Facebook. All it does is favor posts that are popular and relevant, whether it is a personal profile post or a brand page post. It also understands what users have engaged with previously, so if you spend a lot of time liking and commenting on certain friends’ posts, those friends (and brands) will show up more often.

Here is a frequently passed around definition of how Edgerank works:

“EdgeRank is an algorithm used by Facebook to determine where and what posts appear on each individual user’s news feed in order to give users relevant and wanted content.

The three variables that make up this algorithm are:

Affinity Score – Facebook calculates affinity score by looking at explicit actions that users take, and factoring in, the strength of the action, how close the person who took the action was to you, and how long ago they took the action.

Edge Weight – Facebook changes the edge weights to reflect which type of stories they think user will find most engaging.

Time Decay – The determines the time passed, if they’re old they probably don’t appear.”

And, yes, a brand page can use advertising to improve their Edgerank. That’s how advertising works. You pay for the ability to cheat the system. As the saying goes, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product,” but I would also add that advertising is the price you pay for an unfair advantage. It’s the way of balancing the universe. You can pay to be at the center of it. ;)

Why Marketers Really Hate Edgerank

There are several reasons why marketers* hate Edgerank:

There is no instant gratification – even if you are a content maestro, it takes time to build an audience without advertising. For my clients, I use advertising to underscore great content instead of in place of it.

They think a ‘Like’ means the Facebook user is endorsing undivided attention – the truth is, there are all sorts of reasons why people like brands on Facebook and, since the average user likes 40 brands and has 229 friends, there is no such thing as undivided attention (or if there is, it’s rare…and a bit odd). The reason your posts aren’t showing up on their newsfeeds is because they aren’t engaging with them.

image from iStockPhoto

Marketing people aren’t generally content people and vice versa – I sat down with a journalist friend of mine who has been hired by a big fashion retailer to do their content. She’s really brilliant at it, but had very little knowledge as to how to use the tools and how to promote the great content she was producing. They wanted her to do both content AND marketing and didn’t understand that those two talents are very different and usually require two roles. People conflate them all too often and though you may find the rare individual that can do both well, it’s best that you split the role for maximum oomph.

Most marketers are still stuck in the old one-way paradigm – helloooo! It’s the social era! This means that even old one-way mediums (billboards, television, radio, magazines, etc) need to get more multi-way in order to survive. So stop treating the social tools as bullhorns. Seriously. This is why you are failing at them. Facebook should be 50% listening, 25% responding and 25% talking (more or less).

Campaigns should be part of content, not the other way around – content done in brief spurts and ebbs and flows just doesn’t work (see #1). It takes time to build an audience, engage them enough to keep them coming back and delight them to the point of wanting to share to their own friends (they have their own audiences and goals). I’ve talked about how content bursts with long silences between hurt your audience on YouTube, but it works the same way in many social mediums and Facebook’s Edgerank is one of them.

Marketers have to learn to work with content people (photographers, videographers, writers, journalists, graphic designers, artists, etc) on their strategy. Creativity and strategy are intertwined. In fact, the strategic process should look something like this:

…and you should enter this loop at learning. (note: I usually remove the launching/promoting part until a few cycles of learning, planning, implementing, learning, planning, implementing…)

The beauty of Facebook is that it is inexpensive and content rich and sky is the limit when it comes to creating engaging content AND everybody is there, hanging out, looking for great distractions. In addition, I don’t believe there are many brands that do it right, so you have every opportunity in the world to raise the bar. Don’t blame the tool, especially when it’s implemented features that benefit the users you are trying to reach. Take a closer look at your own content. Are you engaging? Are you creating content your fans would be excited to share? Are you creating value? Improving knowledge? Lives? Are you making your customers’ lives simpler, less confusing, less alienating, more efficient, more meaningful and just plain better? Or are you just adding to the noise?

Abandoning Facebook would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s a great tool if you understand that it isn’t a billboard. And remember, it’s much less expensive and gives you all sorts of ways to hear from your audience and understand who you are hearing from (which is very difficult with a billboard).

* I really shouldn’t lump all of us in the same boat. I love Edgerank and think it’s a beautiful and user-centric feature for Facebook. It just makes me work harder to create engaging content and I love a good challenge. I know there are great marketers out there who get this, too.

2 Comments on “Marketing’s REAL Beef with Facebook”

Hi Tara – I defiintely agree with the content and marketing split, however, I’m in the same boat, doing both. Sometimes when you work in a small company, you have to wear multiple hats…With that being said, I’ve improved my writing skills. Now, I just need to improve my content promotion skills!

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Although I spend a good deal of time railing against marketing and consumerism, I am by profession a marketing professional. But as a marketing professional, I remember that I'm also a consumer and that my consumer hat is always more in style.

I'm an author, a researcher, a writer, a speaker, an entrepreneur, a marketer, an armchair political pundit, an open source advocate, a geek, a fashionista, an avid reader, a mom, a pug lover, a karaoke-er, a canadian, a foodie, a traveler, a runner, a classic movie buff....and so much more.

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interdisciplinarian. author. speaker. marketer. geek. curious.

I'm a customer-happiness focused marketer and strong believer that the social web and cooperation on web standards is the key to creating a better, more efficient, customer-empowered, business-benefiting world.